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Tripwire At 25: Frank Quitely Part One

Published

10 years ago

February 13, 2017

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♦February 2017 marks the 25th anniversary of Tripwire, which began as a print magazine back in 1992. So every day this month, we shall be representing a classic interview or feature from our long history. Tripwire has had an association with Frank Quitely since 1995 and so today’s 25th anniversary throwback is the first part of an interview we did with Quitely which ran in Tripwire Volume 1 #9 back in May 1995. Part Two tomorrow and Part Three on Wednesday…

QUITE FRANKLY

Frank Quitely is set to make a big splash in 1995. Joel Meadows talked, via the Royal Mail, to the softspoken Glaswegian…

In 1995 the name Frank Quitely is going to be the one to look out for. After spending the past two years illustrating strips like Shimura and Missionary Man for Fleetway’s Judge Dredd Megazine, Quitely is set to make a big splash on the American side of things. With a Lobo special and a Vertigo miniseries, Flex Mentallo, written by Grant Morrison, set to appear this year, he is about to become a star. Despite my reservations concerning postal interviews, I conducted a postal chat with Frank in January

JOEL MEADOWS: What triggered off your initial interest in comics?

FRANK QUITELY: When I was wee I loved comics, I’ve been good at drawing for as long as I can remember and I always loved looking at the artwork. When you’re young enough, all comic artwork and book illustrations look brilliant. I used to make up my own comics with my own characters, but I never ever finished a story because it took so long. I’ve still got some of them in my mum’s house.

JM: When you were growing up, what sort of comics did you like to read?

FQ: I used to get one comic a week. It was the Beezer and the Beano when I was really young, and the Bullet when I was a little older but I used to read my pals’ comics, like Hotspur, Tiger & Scorcher, Warlord, that sort of thing. I loved Johnny Cougar and I was in the Fireball fanclub. I would have worn the pendant but it had a cheap, crappy nylon string so I didn’t. My two big sisters got The Mandy and The Bunty and I read them too. My faves were The Four Marys and Fay Fearless. I also remember a story called The Cat or something like that. It was set in Nazi Germany and everyone thought it was a guy, but it was really a young girl who wore a black suit and helmet and did really daring things. I loved that as well.

This guy, Sean Wilkie, who lived across the road used to let me read his Marvel comics. He had the X-Men and lots of others. Daredevil and Conan were two of my favourites. In Millport there’s a wee shop called the Camel Café but we called it Ferdi’s cause that was the guy’s name, and I used to buy Creepy Worlds, Tales of Suspense, Sinister Tales and all that sort of stuff every time we went there (about 3 or 4 times a year). But the only comic I read regularly throughout my teens was Mad. It was brilliant. They used to use a lot of old-fashioned looking artists that were great and of course they had Sergio Aragones and Jack Davis but my favourite was always Mort Drucker. The other thing I always read was The Broons and Oor Willie. Dudley D Watkins was another of my heroes.

JM: How did you come up with the name Frank Quitely?

FQ: It’s a Spoonerism of Quite Frankly.

JM: Your style is very European. Do you like a lot of European comic artists?

FQ: I do now. When I started out drawing comics I hadn’t heard of anyone, never mind anyone European. Moebius is my favourite European artist.

JM: You started out drawing for Electric Soup, a Scottish humour comic. Would you rather draw humour or action/ adventure like Missionary Man or Shimura and please give your reasons.

FQ: The thing I liked about working on Electric Soup was that we were self-published when we started out and none of us had drawn for a comic before so it was a bit like being wee again and just doing anything you wanted – that’s something that’s really good about small press. I love doing the action/ adventure stuff too, and I’ve done some documentary style material for Andy Helfer for his Big Books. Ideally I’d like to do a bit of everything: horror, sci fi, humour, action, violent, romantic, weird. Anything at all. And superheroes of course.

Part Two here tomorrow

JOEL MEADOWS